


RLogic

by Deviant_Accumulation



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-24
Updated: 2014-10-24
Packaged: 2018-02-22 11:46:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2506643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deviant_Accumulation/pseuds/Deviant_Accumulation
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, the chains that bind you are not meant to be broken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	RLogic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GVSpurlock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GVSpurlock/gifts).



Minesweeper hadn’t always been called Minesweeper. It started out in the 1980 with a game called Cube, which was based on a similar puzzle style as its descendant. Cube was succeeded by RLogic, which became available in 1985 and was closer to the nowadays Minesweeper than Cube, but still had a few differences, one of them being the basic start point of the game. Instead of having to find all of the mines, the player had to navigate their path through a bomb field from top left to right bottom corner.

  
His mother gave him his first computer when he was 7, a defect model she had taken out of the trash from her workplace, and repaired in long hours. She was also the one who taught him basic programming, whenever she didn’t have to work late again.

  
There weren’t many programs on the computer, but one of them was RLogic, at that time already two years old. He had never been one for games, not the common ones at least, preferring juggling numbers and logical challenges to board games and his mother loved to indulge him, setting tasks for which he had to create a program that could solve them. So it was fair to say that she could keep him busy very well, but not always, which was how he found RLogic.

  
The problem with RLogic’s structure of the playfield, it was possible that all mines would form a row, so that no matter how the player processed, he could never reach the goal, as he had no way of going past the mines. A no-win situation.

  
It takes him two days in total to figure out how to get into the program’s coding, to understand the games’ program language and to rewrite it into doing exactly what he wants.

  
When he presents his work to his mother after those two days she hugs him tightly and whispers that she is so, so proud of him; and in that moment he feels that if he just works hard enough there is nothing that he can’t do, no limits set for him.

  
Three years later his mother dies.

  
A car accident – the other driver was drunk and bled to death, while his mother had her neck snapped. She died without suffering, his aunt tells him at the funeral, one patronizing hand on his shoulder. She’s the only relative he has left, his mother’s parents dead and his father’s name unknown. As he can’t live on his own, no matter how much he wants too, she takes him in, mostly because of the scandal that would arise should it come out that she left her own sister’s son on the street. As a political figure she does have the money, but not the time to provide for him, so the first thing she does after taking him in is sending him to a boarding school. It’s not a time he likes to look back on. The cliché of the nerdy student, the scrawny know-it-all, even with bad skin once he’s past his thirteenth birthday.

  
The only good thing is that the boarding school has a lot of money. Which is why they have three whole rooms full of state-of-the-art computers and other technological equipment. Those three rooms soon become his sanctuary, as the few other ones that frequent those rooms are quiet and keep to themselves just as he does.  
He learns how to build circuits, then robots, how to modify computers and then mobile phones. He teaches himself other program languages by using the internet.

  
His teachers soon recognize his talent, but don’t quite know what to do with him. They put him into advanced IT courses, but all they do is bore them, the by the teacher set pace frustrating him. It’s this boredom that motivates him to look past his boundaries, past programming mere problem solvers and to delve into more… challenging and not necessarily legal dealings.

  
He’s good, and he gets even better, learning fast and having no problems in keeping up with the quickly changing and evolving cyber world. Programming viruses, hacking into servers and all the while steadily building a reputation. It’s a world without limits for him out there, no rules to slow him down, no one there to tell him what he can or can’t do. He’s falling behind in most of his classes, only bothering to invest his time in subjects that are relevant to IT technology. It’s not so much that he would fail any of his classes, but enough to get him labelled as even more of a problem child.

  
One of the teachers tries to talk to him, Ms Abend, a woman in her mid-fourties who teaches chemistry. She pulls him aside and talks to him for about an hour, tries to get answers out of him, why he barely gets through his English and Latin classes (he wants to explain to her that he does care, but despite their complexity those subjects just can’t seem to hold his interest), why he doesn’t socialize with his class mates (why would he?) and if he isolates himself because he is still affected by his mother’s death.

  
He is somewhat taken aback by the last question and for a moment he has to concentrate and think. There is still pain whenever he thinks of his mother, but it feels less sharp and cold and more like a dull throb, mingled with the few pleasant memories he has of her.

  
Before he can answer Ms Abend’s question she has already taken his lengthy silence as a refusal. He doesn’t bother to correct her and she finally excuses herself, placing her hand on his shoulder as she says goodbye.  
He gets an e-mail three months later. Someone wants him to hack the servers of an office building and disable certain features in their firewalls. It’s nothing he hasn’t done before. The e-Mail includes some basic information, the amount of money he’ll get if he is successful and an already established online connection to the normally closed off servers. He should have gotten suspicious then; someone must have broken into the building and connected those servers to the outer world; someone planned this on with more care than the usual hacker who just wanted to dox someone.

  
He doesn’t get suspicious though. He is bored and he sees the money and the whole thing is enough to busy him for an hour and he doesn’t think any more of it after the money gets transferred to his account.  
Two days later he sees the office building again, in the news this time. A suspected terrorist attack, the news anchor reads when he clicks on the video, three people dead and the national security forces are on the case.  
He breathes in slowly, then stands up and breaks the mirror in his bathroom.

  
It takes him three days to hunt down the terrorists. He has two good starting points, the e-Mail and the money trail, but the ones he is trying to find were good at hiding themselves.

  
He is better.

Three days later MI6 finds the identity of all twenty-three members of the terrorist group on their desktops.  
Four days later a woman and a man in expensive suits come and visit him.  
They ask him many questions, which he all answers truthfully – his background, his illegal hacking activities, how he aided the terrorists.

Then they offer him a job.

It’s in the evening, when he has finally finished cleaning his room and packing his personal belongings, that Ms Abend knocks on his door.

‘Why?’ she simply asks.

‘I need someone to limit me,’ he answers and she nods like she understands. Maybe she really does, he thinks as he shoulders his bag. Maybe she had already known back then, before all of this had happened, that he was too naïve and too irresponsible to be left to his own devices, maybe she now knows that he is now scared of what he might become if he continues this way, that he’ll always remember the names of the three people that died because of him. Or maybe she doesn’t and simply pretends. He doesn’t ask her as he walks past her and out of his old life.

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to go for trick/scary, but in the end it didn't quite work out as I had intended and it ended less trick-y. I hope the tricked one will still be satisfied ;)


End file.
